An old Volare meets its end

I bought it from a man whose mother had just died, the car she drove only to church on Sunday and bingo on Tuesday and while I knew that was a lie, it was a car I could buy with a $100 bill and still get change back. Since all I had was a $100 bill, I took him up on the offer.

So on that day eight years later, when I put the key in the ignition and heard only the jingling of the other keys on the chain, I thought, not bad, getting eight years out of a $75 car. Who can complain? I called Ron at the garage to see if the patient could be saved, but he needed less time to render a decision than the Volare needed to warm up on a January morning.

“Massive systems failure,” he said, patting me on the shoulder consolingly. “Sorry, bud. I know how hard it is to lose a car.”

I didn’t because I held no special fondness for the Volare, but I didn’t tell Ron because I knew how closely he held all cars to his heart. This one was brick red with a black vinyl roof, the brick red now tinged with patches of rust brown, the black vinyl peeled off the roof in strips and chunks. She was as ugly as the day she was conceived in the mind of some misbegotten Chrysler engineer, but the engine always ran, despite the blue cloud that burst from the tail pipe whenever I turned the ignition. I offered it to Ron for parts but he shook his head and said there’s not much value in a 30-year old car that was crap to start with. “Only thing you’ll get for that is scrap,” he said in a hushed voice, as if in respect for the dead, and offered to call Mickey for me. Mickey owned Mickey’s Metal and Scrap and his real name was Glenn but he went by Mickey because he thought Mickey’s Metal and Scrap sounded better. He was a tall, scrawny man with bifocals and a thick mustache that might have been popular when the Volare rolled off the line in 1978. He looked through the bottom half of his glasses as he inspected the car like a rancher might a bull before auction.

 “Air conditioning?” he asked, chewing on a blade of grass he pulled from a crack in the parking lot.           
“It does, but the freon ran out years ago,” I said.

“Good, that’ll help me with the environmental people,” he said. “How many miles you got on those tires?”

“50,000,” I guessed. They were the same tires it had when I bought it.

“Hmph,” he humphed. “Ain’t gonna get shit for those.”He looked for another minute, closed his eyes as if trying to divine a message from the gods, then threw away the blade of chewed-up grass.

“$20,” he said. I took it because I was surprised to be offered even that much and so he pulled the wrecker around while I emptied my long-collected junk from inside. The thing had become a rolling garbage can, the back seat filled with empty bottles and rolled up hamburger wrappers, the space under the front seats stuffed with potato chip bags and newspapers. I found four ice scrapers, a can of Heet, a half-empty bottle of motor oil, a Cure tape I thought I had sold in a rummage sale, car insurance cards going back five years. There was a parking ticket from the City of Naperville from years earlier but never paid, and for which I figured to be in the clear as long as I stayed out of Naperville because the Naperville police aren’t likely to send an officer on a search to collect an outstanding $5 parking ticket. In the glove box I found a spare condom, a just-in-case that turned out to be wishful thinking. There was the pair of fuzzy dice that hung from the rearview mirror for a year until I decided they weren’t amusing anymore and threw them in the back seat. Suffocating at the bottom of it all was St. Christopher, the statue left on the dashboard by the former owner that I pulled off and dropped on the floor as soon as I rounded the corner from her house. I also found eight quarters, nine dimes, five nickels and two pennies, for a bonus of $3.17 in spare change.

The occasion took on a kind of solemnity, like a mortician tending the deceased before burial. The Volare was nothing more than cheap transportation to me, but I now felt a burst of heatrbreak at the thought of losing it. The little things that so irritated me once seemed quaint now, the black-as-night upholstery that absorbed heat and made the car hotter than a pizza oven in the summer, the seat belt that never quite reached all the way to its buckle. I looked one last time at the radio, the shift stick, the odometer that read 206,000 miles, right on the button. Even the tenth-mile indicator was a 0, so it read 206,000.0. How strange  it should settle on so precise a number, like this was intentional, as if the Volare said, ‘OK, I’ve driven 206,000 miles, that’s a long, productive and happy life, much longer and more productive than anybody had the right to expect out of a 1978 Volare, and now it’s time to go.’

I thought about all the different things I’d done with the car that would have made the odometer read 206,001, or 206,023, or 205,995. And I thought of things that might have happened, but didn’t. What if that parking spot at Target had been filled so I drove three or four stalls down to find another? What if I had driven all the way into the garage at home one night, instead of just parking on the street? All that driving, parking, starting and stopping brought this car to 206,000 miles on the button. I had to live my life exactly as I had for that to happen. If I changed one thing, if I had walked to the store instead of driven, if I had gone through the drive-through instead of parking, if I had sat patiently in freeway traffic instead of driving a few extra miles on the uncongested side streets, the odometer would not have ended where it ended. It might have been just a matter of inches that I did or didn’t drive that set it to 106,000 miles on the dot. 
But what if I had done any of those things I didn’t do, if I had gone through the drive-through, or parked the car in the garage? Would my own life be any different if the odometer had read 205,995? Maybe that one mile I did or didn’t drive saved me from a head-on collision or a five-car pile-up or a child tragically chasing a ball between two parked cars. Or maybe parking in that spot at Target got me into the store just in time to avoid being run over by someone who wasn’t paying as much attention to his driving as he should.

“Hey, you done in there yet?” Mickey barked, his wrecker hooked up to the Volare now, its engine chugging and ready to haul this sudden metaphor for my life to its fate. “I’d like to get it to the yard before I have to change my underwear.”

I stepped out trying hard not to picture Mickey in his underwear.

“I was just thinking,” I said.

“Well, your thinking is costing me money,” he shouted back. “Think on someone else’s time.”

I slung the bag of my life’s detritus over my shoulder and pushed the door closed, wincing at the usual creak I was never able to get used to and that I would never hear again. When the door clicked shut, Mickey jumped into his truck and drove off, dragging the Volare behind like a lion hauling off a gazelle.